MG Siegler dived into why Search+ is really not good and after going through it all, he has this to say about Google:

It’s like they’re suffering from brain diarrhea.

That’s actually a pretty perfect way to sum up everything that Google does. Not that this is necessarily bad, just that Google can’t seem to stop and think about things before starting new projects.

Perfect evidence of this is Google Wave.

They have really great projects that they start, but they seem to lack on idea of what the use case is, or the follow through needed to make them a success. Search+ seems like one of those things that the engineers pushed through without thinking about the ramifications.